We went out snorkeling today at a good location, though the sea was a little rough. We spotted a sea turtle in the distance.

It went up for air…

… then swam down…

… and tried to sit in a big tube-shaped coral head.

Then there was a strange transparent penis shaped thing.

Paula thinks it’s a pyrosome, in which case it’s a glow-in-the-dark penis shaped thing. Apparently they are colonies of hundreds of thousands of zooids, which along with zoon, zoa, and zoea are great Scrabble words.

At first we thought these were some sort of a jellyfish…

… but then I thought they were salps…

… and wrote a whole post about the sex life of the salp (fascinating creatures that change sex and clone themselves) …

… but then Paula found out they were comb jellies, which are hermaphrodites and can fertilize themselves. That’s interesting I suppose but not as cool as salp.